Dead friends (amigos muertos)
2011 · 10m · Canadá
Directed by Stephen W. Martin
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, whimsical
Nine-year-old Lola Turtle's only company is her treasured, ragged stuffed bunny, Mister Wimperbottom, until she finds a way to grow her own 'dead' best friend.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A kid literally grows a dead friend from the ground like a vegetable—it's the kind of premise that should be precious and fail spectacularly, but Martin leans into the genuinely unsettling logic of it instead of winking at the audience, which is exactly why it works.
The film's formal restraint—its refusal to oversell the gothic premise with overwrought aesthetics—places it in conversation with contemporary dark fairy tales that understand the power of deadpan delivery and compositional clarity.
The decision to keep Mister Wimperbottom in frame throughout, even as the 'dead friend' appears, anchors the surrealism in Lola's emotional reality; it's a single staging choice that makes the whole impossible thing feel inevitable.